Ladies and gentlemen of the Mozilla.org Community At Large: Over the last two weeks I have begun coordinating an effort in this newsgroup, in various bugs at Bugzilla, and most notably in the #documentation IRC channel on moznet to overhaul our processes and policies of documentation for Mozilla.org. Those who have been following the debates know we have a lot of work to do in Documentation, specifically to get our house in order.
Although I have not officially assumed any title of management for our Documentation efforts, John Keiser has been kind enough to dub me the "de facto coordinator" of Documentation. Unless someone else wants the position, I would like to officially assume leadership of the Mozilla.org Documentation effort. In terms of our roadmap for documentation: the consensus is that our roadmap is not specific enough on the tasks to accomplish. Until now, I'd chosen to keep the roadmap deliberately generalized, in deference to a sense that the community should hash this out instead. I see now that specific goals give us specific targets to reach -- and also specific answers to what needs to be changed in the roadmap. In conjunction with the roadmap, we also need to formally list the volunteers we have to manage Documentation at Mozilla.org. I want to make this distinction clear: management of Documentation does not imply writing of specific documentation. Nor does it imply editing of specific documentation. Management in this sense refers primarily to making sure we dot our i's and cross our t's, that we define and enforce consistent policies regarding specific documentation, and that we help ensure the right people write, edit, and catalog the documentation. Obviously, we need to list the right people willing to write, edit, and catalog documentation. We also need to list what needs documentation. We have partial lists, put together by various people who may end up managing those parts of our Documentation efforts, but we need people to step forward and say they'd be willing to write up lists of what needs documenting and help us enforce our policies. One of the biggest concerns raised to date about our overhauling of the Documentation effort is that we make this process easy, that we do not throw up brick walls to slow the process down or make it excessively difficult. It is a Number One Priority of our Documentation managers to keep it simple and sweet for everyone. That is, if you're writing, editing, or cataloging documentation, we want to make it easy for you to do what needs doing in a timely manner. From a Documentation efforts standpoint, the goals are to have experts in the field verify the documentation is accurate; our primary tasks as managers are to make sure the docs are "clean": spelling is good, grammar is good, documentation follows style guides, etc., etc. If we're not making it easy for documenters to "polish" and publish their work usefully, we are not doing our job. That being said, there will probably be some rules laid down from those of us managing Documentation. It can't be helped, really; if we don't enforce some standards (besides XHTML 1.0 and CSS), we will not get very far. Our goal as managers is to keep those rules simple and few in number. Opinions? Anyone else want this job, to set policy for Documentation? Anyone want to offer advice? Alexander J. Vincent author, JavaScript Developer's Dictionary (Sams Publishing) www.jslab.org
